The "site" is vulnerable? Isn't the problem that Americans are vulnerable to influence campaigns?
That is called the First Amendment. The fact that others in the world discuss US politics is not a problem.
The deplorable state of US politics is the problem.
No citizen of the US needs to be protected.
We will find when politicians better represent Americans, not big money, no protection is needed.
Same goes for media. When do you see a solid discussion of net neutrality presented in the mainstream media, or an economic story told from the labor point of view? Two super easy examples.
People go seeking elsewhere, and with all of that comes these worries over people actually discussing policy!
Shocker. It's as if having a real conversation is a threat somehow.
Perhaps it is. Perhaps it should be.
I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist, but it sure seems that having a populace without strong critical thinking skills, and without formal training to recognize propaganda (and marketing) plays into the hands of the elite* by allowing them to maintain and expand their hold on the economy and government.
*noblemen might be more appropriate here than Bourgeoisie, even the 1% term is fairly inaccurate because its more like .01%.
Nobleman are the land-bound pre-capitalist elite; other than a handful tolerated for symbolic purposes, those that remain elites have done so by joining the capitalist elite, the bourgeoisie. So, no, bourgeoisie is the more accurate term.
Do you think the issue might be a little more nuanced than that?
Hard to wage a campaign against intellectually lazy voters.
There are a number of steps that our country could take towards having elections that require or at least strongly encourage more informed voting. I think a solid first step would be stripping all party affiliations from the ballots. If you want to vote for only one party blindly, that's fine, but you are going to need to memorize the name of the Democrat running for the school board then.
Other/alternative steps include switching to STV or Ranked Choice voting, and anything that discourages a duopoly in political parties, such as mixed member proportional representation and perhaps even making the president an appointed position. Some of that is pretty out there though.
As a major proponent of uncensored speech on the internet, the implications of these accusations worry me. Politicians, practically by definition, have a conflict of interest in terms of moderating political speech.
The idea that these same politicians could be drafting law-based "solutions" for such moderation leads me to draw hyperbolic comparisons to dystopian novels.
People are illogical; they follow what they read. If you read a comment that says something about Clinton or Trump, and it has 3.2k upvotes, some part of you somewhere is going to start to absorb that opinion. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam. Pretty soon they didn't need to pay for comments; people adopted and repeated and believed the sentiments themselves.
That being said, I have no clue how to begin to fix this without clamping down on the Internet and free speech, which I'm against. But it is a very real problem.
Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and many actually voted Trump (I even remember someone saying that he was voting for Trump, because things need to get bad before they can get good).
I've got some work in progress that has been very successful innoculating communities against these things.
People are looking for technical and legal solutions to human problems. It won't end well.
The implications to solving both could bring functional change to trolling and bot traffic in open forum sites.
I guess upvotes mess with that by implying the message is peer approved.
How do we tell people to not believe upvotes?
I can't say too much publicly about it, but many of the methods used elsewhere for security, for summarization, and for content generation have applications in this field -- ones that are being actively researched to defend against these sorts of abuses without destroying our ideals (such as free speech).
Part of the problem is that many of us pulled away into our own little worlds following 9/11, the Patriot Act, Snowden's leaks, etc. (I did! I worked in adtech making this all worse instead of engaging with, eg non-profits, government, etc to make it better.) So we weren't actively engaged in developing these solutions earlier and we left a gap in the national infrastructure.
If you'd like, I could reach out to you privately to discuss some ideas in a little more detail...?
What's dystopic about having reddit publish a list of ads that are paid for by certain groups of people?
Meanwhile the companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have disincentives to cut down on this type of thing. The added traffic, even it is from dummy accounts in Russia, is added revenue. It also seems like a majority of our elected officials are fine with anything that keeps them in power. Odds are this gets worse before it gets better.
A couple weeks ago I received a phishing call from someone claiming to represent the FBI. When you googled the information they gave about the location of their office, or their phone number, you saw facebook pages, and tons of other very real looking websites surfacing that they were the FBI. I've since reported this information of all of the various legitimate websites, and they have done nothing simply because they aren't forced to.
The problem with the idea that anyone was able to influence anything is that the boundaries of what gets seen is largely affected by what you already think.
Clinton and Sanders supporters were not seeing a lot of the pro-Trump propaganda in terms of bot-posts and news feeds on Facebook at least (Facebook data about post views and news feeds was the topic of the presentation.)
And I have a hard time believing that spamming reddit actually caused enough of a shift to sway things in a meaningful way. It has the same echo chamber characteristics that Facebook exhibits, though I can’t prove that yet.
What I will say is possible is that the echoes in these silos could have been motivational in getting people who were already trump supporters to go out and vote, and the targeted ads against Hillary could have caused some people to stay home who would have otherwise voted for her.
I feel certain that Russia attempted to sway the election. I’m simply not convinced that they were able to do so.
There just isn’t enough uncertainty to be accounted for in my mental model of how things went down.
This was a contest between the two least popular candidates in the history of those metrics. Republicans hated Trump, and Democrats hated Hillary. It was a contest between who is the least biggest loser from the beginning.
Americans in general are feeling pretty bad about politicians and government. Everyone pretty much hates the whole shitstorm.
Trump also made better strategy decisions. He went to places in the final days of the campaign that Hillary should have been. But she was taking a victory lap and trying to bump numbers in red states instead of locking down the rust belt.
Hillay’s team had better polling data than we had in the national polls. She knew going back from before the primaries that Florida was a much closer race than what it looked like to us. To me, this was the most interesting thing that came out of the DNC leaks. Her team chose to ignore this and acted with a lot of hubris in general.
Comey’s behavior was pretty bad and caused a small but important last minute shift in the polls.
And in general, there is a real divide between city and country folks as well as between the wealthy and everyone else. I grew up on a farm in middle of nowhere Texas, I live in NYC now. The difference is real.
The models I was running with data from the DNC leaks and accounting for the average error of polling results vs election outcomes had Trump winning for weeks in advance of the election. I was so convinced and afraid of a Trump win that I took a week of unpaid vacation to work for the Hillary campaign.
The bottom line in U.S. elections is that Democrat and Republican voters are fairly static. Elections—ironically enough—are decided by 10-12% of the population that will swing one direction or the other based on who they are least pissed off at in the moment.
When I put all of these factors together, I can’t see very much uncertainty that’s not explained.
To be clear, I think that interference—even if it was only attempted and not effective—should be prosecuted and the Trump team should be impeached, indicted, and jailed.
But at the same time, I think people need to calm down about the effects of social media. I don’t see supportive data for the idea that it actually changed anything.
I certainly don’t see any evidence that says this is such a problem that we need to limit speech on the internet. Using the Trump win to set up legal restrictions of speech on social media is like using a terorist attack to limit your right to protest.
Oh fuck me. We already did that. I guess we’re probably screwed.
There is a legitimate or at least semi-legitimate function of having businesses educate legislators on what impact their existing, proposed or "needed" legislation has on their business. e.g. what would happen to Disney, Universal, et al if Copyright term were reduced to 1 year-after-first-publication? "OMG end of days and we will fire all your constituents!"
Sorry, to be a bit more serious: other groups like EFF, AARP, etc can also lobby legislators to tell them "our members would suffer greatly if you passed H.R. 9999 because it would restrict our access to Xyz and cause them harm. Could you amend your bill to include exclusions for these purposes?" The details of these things can be subtle and it's worth paying someone to hound the legislator to make sure all of the details are covered and they don't try to sweep your group's needs under the rug.
Or at least that's how I imagine it working since that's basically personal influence 101.
Who else has lobbied for the liability protections of online platforms? Kim DotCom?
[0] Google Transparency Project[1] claims that Google has funded 34 different groups opposing SESTA. http://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles/google-fun...
[1] Google Transparency Project ironically is not transparent about their donors, and has been occasionally questioned as to their motives and backing.
Remember this article https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/technology/google-will-ba... ? Right after election both Facebook and Google came out saying they will protect us from fake news. That's a good goal on the surface. We can certainly do without lizard people conspiracies. However the timing wasn't accidental. They basically announced they are the ones who will be willing to manufacturing consent and do a better job than CNN and NYT and friend. Effectively saying "Don't go to them, they failed you, spend your billions on us. We'll make sure your version of truth is the real truth. If we have to ban and some accounts, no big deal, we've got you covered https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/business/facebook-china-g...
